"What making a home for hope does do, however, is shift how we see the suffering around us. It brings new possibilities to light and orients our response toward a future. Hope keeps us from hiding under the covers and eggs us on to action."

GSR Today - The Daughers of Charity in Ethiopia are among groups trying to increase eye care in a country where 80 percent of blindness is preventable and other eye diseases are prevalent.

Sr. Eileen McKenzie first found herself drawn to biology and studying life in high school. "It's tending to this miracle of the human body and spirit," she said. She went to nursing school and worked as a nurse in California before sensing a call to religious life and becoming a Lay Mission Helper. As a Lay Mission Helper, she spent three and a half years in Cameroon, learning about different cultural aspects of health care and how family, relationships and beliefs can play a role.

Nuns on the Bus Blog - Now that I've had some time to rest up and reflect on the experience of the Nuns on the Bus, Mending the Gap tour, I've been able to identify what I consider to be five important takeaways.

GSR Today - We get busy during the summer months, and sometimes don't see things we would have liked to. So this is sort of an in-case-you-missed-it edition of the blog, where we dig through the to-do pile and the overflowing inbox and find some keepers.

Summer in Bullhead City, Arizona, can be grueling. Temperatures (and tempers!) are often above 120 degrees Fahrenheit during the day in this sometimes-drug-plagued town near the intersection of Nevada, California and Arizona on the Colorado River. As a physician assistant working in psychiatry and emergency medicine and also a Racine Dominican associate, I have grown to love working and living in the Southwest, but summers are a definite test of that love.

Haitian immigrants living in the Dominican Republic and working as sugar cane cutters are isolated by geography and economics from accessing medical care. Medicines for Humanity brings mobile health clinics to more than 20 communities each month. Catholic sisters are integral to the teams that travel to two bateyes: Daughters of Charity in Quisqueya, and the Grey Sisters of Immaculate Conception in Consuelo.

"If you really want to experience the love of God, you will have to come out of the cozy environment of religious life and dedicate your life for serving the needy, sharing their joys and pain. This will shape you as real son or daughter of God."

Nuns on the Bus Blog - When I was growing up, it wasn't an aspiration to become president. And yet, here I was, more than five decades later, about to witness something we had never imagined happening become a real possibility.